I'm entering a juried show at the new Artists Corner and Gallery in Acton, MA. The theme is Homage to Kandinsky's Circles, which you can see here. I decided to make each square on a separate small cradled panel. That way there are many ways to arrange them on a wall, or they can be stacked on a shelf. Pretty wild aren't they? I hope this piece gets in, it took rather longer than I expected!

Monday, January 18, 2016

Yesterday I taught a fun workshop at Artascope in Yarmouth, Maine. Students had gathered to learn how to put together a regular painting practice on a time budget. I'm a big believer that painting small paintings regularly, and doing your best to finish them in one sitting is the way to go to see fast improvement in your work. I also think that an approach using a solid value under painting makes for better composition, and thus better paintings. This was the basis for our workshop.

As part of the workshop I taught yesterday on building a regular painting practice on a time budget, we talked about how to minimize the obstacles that get in the way of painting regularly. See the list we discussed at the bottom of this post.I showed the above photos of my "bedroom" studio. For years I painted in this small bedroom, setting up my still life on a cooler sitting on the double bed which took up most of the floor space! Eventually we needed fewer bedrooms and I was able to move out the bed, install an old desk set up that was headed for the dump, and over time added a couple of Ikea items. But I'm still heavily invested in cardboard, as you can see by the organizers in the photos above. Note that even the taboret is a big cardboard box, and there are others around the room, taped shut, which are used to make stands for still life set ups. The fancy easel is new, for a long time I used either an aluminum Stanrite easel or my plein air box and tripod.

Make it easy to paint - get rid of the obstacles

-->

Minimize set up and clean up

·Studio in a
bedroom

·Easel

·Masterson box
for palette

·Big flat box
under the bed )to hold your supplies when not in use)

·Cardboard boxes
are great

·Ikea is great

·Ziplock bags are
great

·Paper towel
tubes are great

·Glass and
plexiglass make good palettes

Be prepared

·Decide what
you’re going to paint the day before, anticipation motivates

·Set up your
still life the day before

·Crop your photo
the night before

Timing

·Paint before you
start doing anything else, especially before you get in the car…

·Tell yourself
you only have to do step x this session

·Tell yourself
you only have to paint for one hour

Paint!

·Paint small and
finish in one session – achievement is a great motivator!

Disclaimer: Some of these ideas are mine, but many come from artist friends and teachers. Thanks to everyone for sharing!

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Drawing and painting aren't the only way to experiment with composition. For these notans, I tore up black construction paper and laid the pieces out on a piece of white paper, then moved them around. I took some photos with my phone and opened them in Photoshop for cropping. The combination of moving the pieces and adjusting the crop creates the composition. You could crop on your phone. But I found that I had to try several crops on each image before I got something that I liked, so Photoshop, where I could save each version, was easier.

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

A simple Notan (the word means dark light harmony in Japanese), contains only black and white. The Notans above were drawn using the principle that, anything in sunlight is white, anything in shadow is black. We've all learned that a compelling composition can be made when 2/3 of the composition is light in value and 1/3 is dark in value, or vice a versa. The Notan is a wonderful device to show us if we are achieving that goal. I know that on my first pass, I'm usually too close to 50/50 ratio.

It's easiest to draw Notans like those above, where the sun gives us an obvious choice for light and dark. But if you are inside, or the day is overcast, you have to make your own judgement as to where the threshold for light and dark should be placed. That often requires experimentation. Take a look at the page below, where I drew thumbnails of a bed, with a lighted lamp on a table to the left side of it. My first drawing is at the top left, and final drawing is at the bottom right. Which of these do you find the most compelling?

Saturday, January 2, 2016

Above are a few more value studies of figures of people in markets in France. I went back to the original photos as references for the five studies. And before I started, I watched two of my favorite Peggi Kroll-Roberts videos. You can check them out on her website here (scroll down, these two are in sets 2 and 3).

My personal favorite is Figure 3. How about you? And I promise, there will be color soon!